A little known fact about BP chief executive is that he's from Slough. And it was clear during his grilling in Washington that Tony Hayward has decided to heed the wisdom of the town's other famous business leader, David Brent.

According to Brent: "You just have to accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue." Sitting alone in front of a hostile US politicians and TV cameras, Hayward grimly accepted that he was most definitely going to be the statue, and the committee was about to do what pigeons do but from a greater height.

Throughout the hearing he maintained steady eye contact with his tormentors. But his nerves were betrayed by his fingers, which appeared to be busily crocheting a pair of invisible socks.

Apart from swigs of coffee, Hayward stayed focussed like a laser beam – as he famously declared BP was on its safety record – on the faces of the committee, with only a few flickers of amusement or disquiet passing across his own.

As the hearing stretched on, starting with long statements read out by committee members with an eye on November midterms, Hayward's body language began to show signs of strain. While his head remained upright, his shoulders and torso slowly slumped forward until it looked, in some camera angles, as if he was about to try and scratch his chin on the opposite edge of the table.

His answers followed similar contortions. Pressed by Henry Waxman and John Dingell, of the committee on energy and commerce, to explain what went wrong, Hayward wasn't taking the bait, no matter how hard they tried. "I can't pass judgment on those decisions," was his reply to a Waxman thrust on why BP choose a cheaper but riskier technique, followed by "I'm not prepared to draw conclusions." In the same vein, Hayward told Bart Stupak – who looks like Arsene Wenger's younger brother but talks like a robot: "I think it's too early to reach conclusions" about BP's multiple failings.

Sadly, for Hayward at least, most of the politicians present had their conclusions ready made – as did US cable news channels, which showed his testimony on a split-screen alongside live video of the oil gushing out of BP's broken well.

When he told Waxman he was "distraught" by what had happened, the Californian Democrat replied with icy disdain: "I don't want to know that you're distraught, I want to know if you've changed your behaviour." At that point Hayward's restless fingers appeared to be typing on an invisible iPad.

Later, Waxman – famous for his terrier-like questioning – accused Hayward of stonewalling. "I'm not stonewalling," replied the BP man in his flat Home Counties drawl. "I simply was not involved in the decision-making."

Hayward's tactics resemble those of Ronald Reagan, who told investigators he couldn't recall the details of smuggling weapons to Contras via Iran. The president's excuse was that he was a busy man and, we now know, suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. So what's Hayward's excuse?

He did have one unlikely ally on the committee: Texan Joe Barton, who actually apologised to BP for its treatment at the hands of the Obama administration. The Democratic party was delighted – a Republican apologising on behalf of America to a foreign oil company! The attack ads practically write themselves.

As Barton's Republican colleagues rushed to distance themselves from his remarks, Hayward for a brief moment wasn't the biggest statue in town.